What if you could give your patients a personal healthcare chatbot to check up on them anywhere, anytime?
Want to set reminders for their next doctor’s appointment?
Want to submit essential documents without traveling to the hospital?
Healthcare chatbots enable you to turn all these ideas into a reality by acting as AI-enabled digital assistants. It revolutionizes the quality of patient experience by attending to your patient’s needs instantly.
What is a Healthcare Chatbot, and What does it do?
Healthcare Chatbot is an AI-powered software that uses machine learning algorithms or computer programs to interact with leads in auditory or textual modes. The engagement happens in an instant and serves the person 24/7.
The healthcare industry incorporates chatbots in its ecosystem to streamline communication between patients and healthcare professionals, prevent unnecessary expenses and offer a smooth, around-the-clock helping station.
Healthcare chatbots are not only reasonable solutions for your patients but your doctors as well. Imagine how many more patients you can connect with if you save time and effort by automating responses to repetitive questions of patients and basic activities like appointment scheduling or providing health facts.
Apart from these, there are many more reasons why one should go for a healthcare chatbot, for example:
Furthermore, if there was a long wait time to connect with an agent, 62% of consumers feel more at ease when a chatbot handles their queries, according to Tidio. As we’ll read further, a healthcare chatbot might seem like a simple addition, but it can substantially impact and benefit many sectors of your institution. Let’s dig into some of the prominent benefits.
Benefits of Healthcare Chatbots
The idea of a digital personal assistant is tempting, but a healthcare chatbot goes a mile beyond that. From patient care to intelligent use of finances, its benefits are wide-ranging and make it a top priority in the Healthcare industry.
1. Enhance Overall Patient Experience
A healthcare chatbot engages with patients and responds instantly. It helps them take their medications on time by setting up reminders and reach their appointments on time by marking their calendars.
A chatbot can offer a safe space to patients and interact in a positive, unbiased language in mental health cases. Mental health chatbots like Woebot, Wysa, and Youper are trained in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), which helps to treat problems by transforming the way patients think and behave.
Patients appreciate that using a healthcare chatbot saves time and money, as they don’t have to commute all the way to the doctor’s clinic or the hospital.
Chatbots are also great for conducting feedback surveys to assess patient satisfaction.
2. Reduce the Burden on Healthcare Professionals
Physicians worry about how their patients might look up and try cures mentioned on dubious online sites, but with a chatbot, patients have a dependable source to turn to at any time.
Doctors also save tremendous time and effort due to chatbots. It conducts basic activities like asking about the symptoms, recommending wellness programs, and tracking behavior or weight changes.
The doctors can then use all this information to analyze the patient and make accurate reports.
3. Save Costs
Healthcare chatbots significantly cut unnecessary spending by allowing patients to perform minor treatments or procedures without visiting the doctor.
It also increases revenue as the reduction in the consultation periods and hospital waiting lines leads healthcare institutions to take in and manage more patients.
According to an MGMA Stat poll, about 49% of medical groups said that the rates of ‘no-shows‘ soared since 2021. No-show appointments result in a considerable loss of revenue and underutilize the physician’s time. The healthcare chatbot tackles this issue by closely monitoring the cancellation of appointments and reports it to the hospital staff immediately.
Now that we understand the myriad advantages of incorporating chatbots in the healthcare sector, let us dive into what all kinds of tasks a chatbot can achieve and which chatbot abilities resonate best with your business needs.
Use Cases of Healthcare Chatbots
1. Share and Assess Relevant Information
Chatbots are made on AI technology and are programmed to access vast healthcare data to run diagnostics and check patients’ symptoms. It can provide reliable and up-to-date information to patients as notifications or stories.
If you wish to know anything about a particular disease, a healthcare chatbot can gather correct information from public sources and instantly help you. It can also check symptoms and run diagnostics to speculate the issue.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, WHO employed a WhatsApp chatbot to reach and assist people across all demographics to beat the threat of the virus.
2. Schedule Appointments and Set Reminders
Most patients prefer to book appointments online instead of making phone calls or sending messages. A chatbot further eases the process by allowing patients to know available slots and schedule or delete meetings at a glance.
It can do this by acquiring information on patients’ requirements, slots, clinics, and physicians.
A healthcare chatbot also sends out gentle reminders to patients for the consumption of medicines at the right time when requested by the doctor or the patient.
3. Retrieve Patient Data
Healthcare chatbots automate the information-gathering process while boosting patient engagement.
If you ever interact with a chatbot, you will see that it collects basic information like names and ailments in the conversation.
It can also incorporate feedback surveys to assess patient satisfaction levels.
4. Become a Mental Health Buddy
Patients suffering from mental health issues can seek a haven in healthcare chatbots like Woebot that converse in a cognitive behavioral therapy-trained manner.
With the use of empathetic, friendly, and positive language, a chatbot can help reshape a patient’s thoughts and emotions stemming from negative places.
Obviously, chatbots cannot replace therapists and physicians, but they can provide a trusted and unbiased go-to place for the patient around-the-clock.
Top 3 Healthcare Chatbots
1. Healthily (previously known as Your.MD)
Healthily is an AI-enabled health-tech platform that offers patients personalized health information through a chatbot. From generic tips to research-backed cures, Healthily gives patients control over improving their health while sitting at home.
Cost: Free
Pros:
- Available on many platforms like iOS, Telegram, and Android
- User-friendly assistance
- Provides location of nearby diagnostic centres, clinics, and pharmacies
Cons:
- Unable to narrow down plausible diseases through its symptoms checker
2. Woebot
Everyone wants a safe outlet to express their innermost fears and troubles and Woebot provides just that—a mental health ally. It uses natural language processing to engage its users in positive and understanding conversations from anywhere at any time.
Cost: Free
Pros:
- User-friendly interface
- Provides action-oriented yet simple solutions for a happy life
- Empathetic, humorous, and positive language
Cons:
- Unable to respond to all concerns and may seem scripted at times
3. Ada Health
You have probably heard of this platform, for it boasts of catering to almost 13 million users as of 2023. Ada Health is a popular healthcare app that understands symptoms and manages patient care instantaneously with a reliable AI-powered database.
Cost: Free
Pros:
- One of the most trusted and used AI-based medical platform
- Good user accessibility features (for ex., available in eleven product languages)
- Provides highly accurate diagnostics
Cons:
- Fairly slow symptom assessment process
A Peek into the Future of Healthcare Chatbots
The world witnessed its first psychotherapist chatbot in 1966 when Joseph Weizenbaum created ELIZA, a natural language processing program. It used pattern matching and substitution methodology to give responses, but limited communication abilities led to its downfall.
Today’s healthcare chatbots are obviously far more reliable, effective, and interactive. As advancements in AI are ever evolving and ameliorating, chatbots will inevitably perform a range of complex activities and become an indispensable part of many industries, mainly, healthcare.
Chatbot becomes a vital point of communication and information gathering at unforeseeable times like a pandemic as it limits human interaction while still retaining patient engagement. Hence, it’s very likely to persist and prosper in the future of the healthcare industry.
Integrate your Healthcare Chatbot with a CRM
So, if everyone’s adopting healthcare chatbots, how do you have an edge amidst the competition?
It’s pretty simple. You integrate your chatbot with a safe and secure healthcare CRM.
- This integration will provide your sales team with at least the fundamental data about the patient as soon as the chatbot interacts with them.
- Real-time assistance by the chatbot can enable your sales users to make intelligible reports as the interactions go down the funnel.
- Analysis of the customer responses can help you make the chatbot more intuitive and personalized over time.
LeadSquared’s CRM is an entirely HIPAA-compliant software that will integrate with your healthcare chatbot smoothly.
FAQs
Yes, many healthcare chatbots can act as symptom checkers to facilitate self-diagnosis.
Users usually prefer chatbots over symptom checker apps as they can precisely describe how they feel to a bot in the form of a simple conversation and get reliable and real-time results.
The goal of healthcare chatbots is to provide patients with a real-time, reliable platform for self-diagnosis and medical advice.
It also helps doctors save time and attend to more patients by answering people’s most frequently asked questions and performing repetitive tasks.
Healthcare chatbots are AI-enabled digital assistants that allow patients to assess their health and get reliable results anywhere, anytime.
It manages appointment scheduling and rescheduling while gently reminding patients of their upcoming visits to the doctor.
It saves time and money by allowing patients to perform many activities like submitting documents, making appointments, self-diagnosis, etc., online.
